Are you interested in learning how to optimize your Chart of Accounts for Robust Management Reporting in JD Edwards? Please join Ed Kimtis, an expert of JD Edwards, as he discusses everyday challenges companies face with financial reporting. Sign up now for our FREE webinar as Ed presents effective strategies for improving management reporting and compliance. In addition, he will discuss how to identify the root cause of reporting issues and effective solutions for the “Top 5″ financial reporting challenges for JD Edwards ERP systems and Chart of Accounts redesign and conversion.
GL Associates has been delivering value in technology projects for over three decades. We provide services that help companies increase market share, improve performance, lower costs and mitigate business risk. For more information on this webinar, our whitepapers, or any of GL Associates services please contact Bill Glasofer, Vice President of Business Development, at bglasofer@glassoc.com or at 888-GLA-6363 x110.
Don’t forget Paul Ricci is doing this really cool presentation!
Come see Paul Ricci, CPA, Vice President and Practice Manager present at Quest Midwest on August 17-18, 2010. Paul has over 10 years of experience in managing ERP implementations, upgrades and integration projects; and he specializes in Property Management, Finance, Distribution and Manufacturing.
If you are interested in attending this informative session, please join GL Associates to learn about:
The JD Edwards 9.0 Upgrade Roadmap
Quest Midwest, August 17-18, 2010
In this session Paul Ricci will discuss proven strategies for planning and executing a JD Edwards 9.0 migration. You will learn the most useful new features, how other companies have organized their upgrade projects and how to plan for the most effective change management. Featured modules include Finance, Distribution, and Real Estate Management.
If you are unable to attend the presentation or would like additional information, please contact Bill Glasofer at 201.451.9121 ext 110 or bglasofer@glassoc.com.
Improve Oracle E-Business Suite Reporting
Through Automated Chart of Accounts Conversion
- Tuesday, July 27th 2010, 1:00 PM EDT -
Click here for free webinar registration!
Would you be interested in an easy and cost-effective means to get consistent, current, and reconcilable numbers out of Oracle E-Business Suite for your reporting needs? Guess what? We have the perfect solution for you: GL Associates Mapping Manager.
The GL Associates Mapping Manager is an AUTOMATED conversion tool for converting or consolidating the chart of accounts (COA) and other master (customers, suppliers, products, etc.) and transactional data. It is a central repository for data mapping that makes it easy for teams to collaborate and dynamically map complex data. The system also has built-in audit and data integrity reporting and versioning controls, for compliance and quality assurance. There are so many benefits:
• Cost-effectiveness
• Fast implementation
• No re-configuring before conversion
• Maintenance of historical data
• Conversion from multiple sources, including spreadsheets
And best of all there’s NO RE-IMPLEMENTATION! With 30 years of Chart of Account Redesign and Conversion experience behind us, GL Associates knows what to do and how to do it right.
For more information on this webinar please contact Bill Glasofer at 201.938.0200 ext 110 or bglasofer@glassoc.com.
If you are going to Quest Northeast this year and are interested in some informative educational sessions, join GL Associates to learn about:
Using a Data Warehouses vs an ERP System
Improving your Financial Close
Here’s an overview of what will be covered:
Financial and Management Reporting – Data Warehouse vs. ERP
Quest Northeast, Wednesday, July 21st, 9-9:50AM
From this presentation, you will better understand the prevailing shift from using ERP systems to Data Warehouses for Financial and Management Reporting. With a range of examples on how to do it, there are many instances where you can make full use of your ERP system as a tool for Financial & Management Reporting, before making a new or increased investment in a Data Warehouse. Join us for this presentation to see what is required for your company.
Successful Strategies for Improving the Financial Close
Quest Northeast, Thursday, July 22nd, 1-1:50PM
This presentation is based on the case study of a large investment services company, which wanted to increase efficiency and reduce cycle time of its financial close. The content will cover common obstacles that hinder the close, value-add analysis techniques, benchmarking of key closing processes and under-utilized best practices. After this presentation you will have some fresh tips for improving the reporting efficiency in your company.
For more information on these presentations, please contact Bill Glasofer at 201.451.9121 x110.
GL Associates Presents
2010 Technology Best Practices at Upcoming Conferences
Topics include Data Warehouses, Financial Closes, ERP System Upgrades, and Compliance
July 15, 2010 – Jersey City, New Jersey (USA) GL Associates, Business Systems consultants for 30 years, is pleased to announce that its consultants are presenting some of the hottest technology topics at the Quest and Oracle conferences to be held in July, August, and September 2010. Most of the topics are based on white papers, which are also presented in live webinars produced monthly by GL Associates.
At Quest Northeast on July 21st and 22nd, GL Associates will be presenting two white papers: Steve Moskowitz’s, “Financial and Management Reporting – Data Warehouse vs ERP” and Howard Manzon’s, “Successful Strategies for Improving the Financial Close”. At Quest Midwest on August 17th and 18th, Paul Ricci will be presenting “JD Edwards 9.0 Upgrade Roadmap”. The last scheduled presentation will be at Oracle OpenWorld on September 19th to 23rd, when Dr. Steele Arbeeny will discuss “Real Time Risk Management and Compliance in Financial Markets Using Oracle Complex Event Processing”.
For more information on any of these presentations, white papers, or webinars, please contact Bill Glasofer at bglasofer@GLAssoc.com or 201.451.9121 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 201.451.9121 end_of_the_skype_highlighting x110.
For more information about the conferences, please visit either www.QuestDirect.org or www.Oracle.com. Note that Quest is a not-for-profit association supporting Oracle applications users, including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Oracle Utilities and the ecosystem, from the underlying ERP solutions to the numerous complementary products and services.
During this webinar, a JD Edwards expert discusses the common challenges companies face with financial reporting and presents effective strategies for improving management reporting and compliance. The presenter will discuss how to identify the root cause of reporting issues and effective solutions for the “Top 5” financial reporting challenges, including best practices for JD Edwards ERP systems and Chart of Accounts re-design and conversion.
You know you are getting robust management reporting, if you can answer YES to all of these questions:
· Do you have a 100% confidence in the accuracy of your reported financial information?
· Can you easily slice-and-dice your business data by regions, divisions, products, markets, etc.?
· Are you able to produce financial statements directly from your general ledger?
· Do you close your books at month-end as quickly as required?
If your system could use improvement in any of these areas, you and your colleagues should join GL Associates, business systems consultants for over 30 years, for our FREE webinar:
Ed Kimtis of GL Associates will speak on the topic “Designing the COA for Government Contractor Reporting” at COLLABORATE 10 in Las Vegas on April 22nd. The presentation will cover project overview, business requirements, the project’s organization and approach, the JD Edwards COA reporting segments, job accounting and the work breakdown structure (WBS), applicable DCAA requirements (i.e. cost pools, indirect cost allocations, burdening, unallowable costs, etc.), management reporting, and change management. Ed will also explain the steps for gathering and analyzing the business’ reporting requirements, recommend an approach for structuring the COA to accommodate DCAA and management reporting, and will provide tips for maximizing the reporting benefits of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0. Find out more at http://www.collaborate10.org.
So IBM introduced a new addition to its venerable POWER line of high-end RISC CPUs earlier in the month, and I think they got something for everybody in there. Its based on the Power 2.06 instruction set and offers a lot more of what made the POWER6 line great…and a lot less of one thing that didn’t. Ha..Ha…Of course you know I mean power consumption. IBM really got the power consumption down from where it was on the POWER6…In some places more than 50% for the high density configurations. This is a big deal for datacenters that are starting to reach the boundary of what their current power and cooling setup can handle. So by upgrading to POWER7 or rethinking their upcoming hardware purchases in terms of POWER7, these organizations can extend the life and capacity of their existing datacenters. This is going to let them put off that new UPS purchase or new 3-phase power buildout for a while.
But back to POWER7. This chip is made using the current IBM 45 nm process and contains approximately 1.2 billion transistors. I guess we’ll have to wait till POWER8 for the 32 nm process. My first impression is, boy this thing is BIG…It has a whopping 27 different instruction formats ! and hundreds of instructions that can run all cool special purpose vector and signal processing units in every nook and cranny on the die. I hope these guys remember what the R in RISC stands for !
Another thing you get over POWER 6 is more cores while still keeping that high clock frequency. Although POWER6 was great, the low number of cores per chip has been a common complaint. This has been rectified in POWER7 with up to 8 cores per chip. Each core has 2 integer pipes and four floating point units, so the unit can be executing up to 12 instructions per core on any one clock cycle. It also has a vector unit…which Ill come to in a second..And this new thingy that appeared in POWER6…The decimal floating point unit. This adds another floating point unit to the data path, but instead of operating on IEEE 754 base-2 numbers it designed to operate on decimals…Gone are the problems of representing 0.1 in binary. Of course, to make it all work you’ve got to use the Decimal128 data type in the IBM xlC or gcc advanced toolchain C/C++ compilers. But this will be a big help in financial data analysis applications.
The vector unit will also be helpful for visualization and other modeling. It is a SIMD instruction similar to Intel SSE with some nice additions. The vector register file contains 32 registers of 128 bits in length. As with all vector RISC machines, all vector and scalar operations are register-to-register. One nice feature is a whole set of vector-vector and vector-scalar operations that can do a multiply, negation and addition in a single instruction. There is even separate rounding instructions with 5 different types of rounding for both scalars and vectors. Closely associated with the vector unit is the Signal Processing Engine which implements instructions that are designed to compute the linear difference equations associated with DSP while leveraging the deep pipeline and multiple execution units on the chip.
There are many applications for this new processor and the line of POWER7 machines that run it…The high number of cores and memory architecture make it ideal for large-scale multi-terabyte data warehouses. With the proper data partitioning and SAN, queries can be configured to run using tens or hundreds of child processes that can really divide and conquer large scale analytics projects. On the other hand, the vector and signal processing components make this an ideal machine for simulation and scientific computing. I wonder if these bad-boys will make it into the next generation of Xbox ? Hmmm…Thanks for reading…
Earlier in the week Microsoft announced its new mobile operating system – Windows 7 Mobile. Hopefully this will give Windows-powered devices the shot in the arm they need to compete with the new Android and iPhone devices we are seeing. The Windows Mobile operating system has taken a beating lately and is looking awfully behind the times when compared with the newer mobile OSes. Browser based apps and non-mission critical applications on these new OSes are poised to take a significant chunk out of Microsoft’s hide. However Windows still reigns supreme as the mobile OS for field force automation type applications due to the robust synchronization capabilities of SQL Server and SQL Server Compact Edition. If you have an “occasionally connected” application that requires a portable database on the device, I really believe that Windows is your only answer – for now. But there are plenty organizations that have occasionally connected mobile apps deployed, and they are beginning to ask about porting to other OSes. I hope this newest introduction from Redmond will give them good reason to stay on Windows.
Organizations of various sizes from large to small are all trying to reduce their IT costs and provide increased performance. This may require them to finally abandon legacy systems, or invest in new infrastructure to provide higher levels of availability or performance. The database layer is one area that is typically targeted in these cost reductions. It’s a good place to start because in many cases, the database layer can be upgraded, consolidated or completely changed with little or no impact on the higher level application tiers that sit above it. Also, in most organizations a given database server may support many different applications, so improvements there can have wide reaching effects.
Database vendors are touting their clustering technology as a potential solution to these problems. A clustered database is comprised of multiple physical servers accessing a single shared disk that contains the data. This allows multiple less-expensive servers to act as a single large virtual server and to distribute load across all the machines. This provides higher levels of redundancy than possible with single machines because all the hardware is duplicated. One piece of equipment can fail and other nodes in the cluster can assume its responsibility. However, before we all jump on the cluster bandwagon, there are a few important things to note. Most importantly is that clustering is not right for every application. It helps to know a little about your load and the applications that will access the database to determine if a clustered database is right for you.
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is a clustering technology offered by Oracle that runs on both their Standard and Enterprise edition products. Oracle Guru Don Burleson has recently published an article on RAC best practices that covers the best practices one should follow when implementing RAC. As Burleson correctly states, the Achilles heel of any clustered database is the cluster interconnect. This is a private network connection between the cluster nodes that is used for synchronization, heartbeat and cache coherency. In the clustered database, each node has its own physical memory that is used to cache data so that recently used data can be read from memory instead of the disk. In a clustered situation, these two caches appear as a single unified cache to the database processes. If a table was just read on node 1 and it is in the cache, and a request is then issued on node 2 for the same table, that data will be sent across the interconnect to node 2 instead of being read from the shared disk.
The importance and impact of this behavior cannot be overstated and it gives us an important clue as to which applications are better suited for clustering and which are not. OLTP type application where queries operate on a small number of records on heavily indexed tables can realize a tremendous benefit from clustering. Since only small amounts of data are read at any one time, the amount of data that has to move through the interconnect is very small, and over time the distributed caches will contain the optimum configuration of the data for the queries that were run.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we have data warehousing and decision support type applications where long-running queries operate on data sets that are large when compared with the unified cache size. This type of application can bring the cluster to its knees rather quickly. Data warehouse operations typically consist of long-running queries that return many rows and may require several intermediate joins and sorts to produce the output. When one of these queries runs on a given node it will essentially flush the cache of all other data and fill it up with data from this query. Then when a request is made on another node for the same data, it must all be pushed through the interconnect. This will quickly saturate the interconnect and once that happens bad things are sure to occur. For example, since heartbeat messages are also sent over the cluster interconnect, saturation could result in nodes being booted from the cluster.
This makes RAC ideally suited for ERP, MRP and other operational systems within the enterprise. While data warehousing and decision support would be better suited to a single “big-box” solution. In either event, these examples are just some of the considerations that you must account for when contemplating a RAC database.
